Madam Speaker, I apologize to the member. I mistook him for the member for Calgary Southeast.
The issue is that the bill seems to put us at the top of a rather slippery slope where we are addressing the freedom of members to act in this place. I would point out that other major countries do not force their party members to resign if they switch parties between elections. In the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill was a member who switched parties. I would not want to think of the consequences if it had a law like this one which would have forced him into a byelection that he would have lost and we would have gone into the second world war without him.
Canada has a precedent for the concept of going back to the constituency to validate changes. It used to be that if members were appointed to the cabinet, which generally took place in a matter of weeks after a general election, they were called upon to hold a byelection to reaffirm their constituents' belief that they should assume that position. In fact, Sir Wilfrid Laurier lost a byelection under those conditions. I think it was deemed through second thought that perhaps that regulation, and I would say this one, was unnecessarily restrictive.
The member talked a bit about costs. I think elections officials have said that a byelection costs about $480,000. I do not think we should be driven by those costs but it is a factor. Let us take, for example, the member for Saanich--Gulf Islands. I just did a quick calculation. He started with the Reform then switched to the Alliance. I must say that my tendency was to be against the bill but I had second thoughts when the Leader of the Opposition said that it would cause all the Alliance members to go to a byelection. We may want to re-think this.
The member for Saanich--Gulf Islands started off as Reform, morphed into Alliance, spun off into a rebel caucus, for which we had no exact definition, and then he sort of attached himself to the PC, which then turned into the PC/DR. He is back in purgatory and is not done yet because I assume he will go back to the Alliance. Not only would that little journey have cost the taxpayers of Canada $2.5 million, but his constituents would have been without a member for 240 days, which is the writ period for each election. This is assuming that he won.
A number of very interesting arguments have been put forth but I do not think there is a consensus. It has been a very interesting topic to debate. I will not be supporting the bill but I will continue to support the member who put it forward with what I think was a sincere attempt to critically examine the rules of this place.
I will end on the issue of the votability of private members' business. Not a private members' debate goes by without motions being put to the floor on whether a motion or a bill should be votable and it is usually framed in rather partisan language about the Liberals deciding not to make it votable. In actual fact the private members' subcommittee on procedure and House affairs is one of the few committees in the federal system that does not have a Liberal majority. It is a committee of backbenchers. It is a committee of our peers.
There is a system in place essentially because the number of private members' bills and motions exceeds the number of hours available for debate on those topics. There is a system in place that has to make some very tough decisions but they are tough decisions that have been made by all parties. It is not a process that is controlled by the government. We are in the process of reviewing that but I would hope that when people talk about votability of private members they keep in mind that it is certainly not the long arm of the government. It is our peers. If a motion or bill has been determined non-votable then a member may want to take that up with his or her peers.